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THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 7, 2019
COURTESYINDIECOLLECT
The 1982 drama “Cane River,” screening in MOMA’s series “To Save and
Project ” ( Jan. 4-31), is a major rediscovery. The unreleased film, long believed
lost, is the only feature by Horace Jenkins, an African-American filmmaker
who died soon after the movie’s completion. It’s centered on the romance of a
young black man, Peter Metoyer (Richard Romain), a recent college graduate
and a poet who returns to his family’s farm in rural Louisiana, and a local
tour guide named Maria Mathis (Tômmye Myrick), a twenty-two-year-old
black woman who’s desperate to escape small-town life and is about to leave
home for college. Maria comes from a poor family descended from enslaved
Africans; Peter comes from a landowning mixed-race family (his ancestors
include enslaved people who also owned slaves), and their relationship is
strained by the groups’ long-standing social differences. Jenkins’s spare, frank
lyricism foregrounds the couple’s tense discussions about the traumas of
history, the weight of cultural memory, and the pressure of racial injustice;
he lends the intimate tale a vast and vital resonance.—Richard Brody
IN REVIVAL
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MOVIES
Cold War
The new film by Pawel Pawlikowski, the direc-
tor of “Ida” (2014), is a small story stretched
over several countries and an expanse of many
years. In Communist Poland, in the late nine-
teen-forties, an ambitious young singer named
Zula (Joanna Kulig) joins a school dedicated
to the folk music of the nation. The resident
pianist is Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), older and
already disillusioned. The two of them fall in
love, and the movie—at once bleak and sump-
tuous, and shot in black-and-white, as “Ida”
was—traces the relationship that ensues, with
results even sadder and more confining than we
might expect. Political freedom, long dreamed
of, brings little release. In Polish.—Anthony
Lane (In limited release.)
Mary Poppins Returns
It takes nerve to trespass on the hallowed ground
of a movie like “Mary Poppins” (1964), but Rob
Marshall’s gamble pays off. The result is a se-
quel of sorts, set many years later. Jane Banks
ing the Algerian militant Djamila Bouhired,
who planted a bomb in an Algiers café in 1956.
Saving Bouhired from the death penalty, Vergès
then married her and avoided politics until the
mid-sixties, when he represented Palestinian ter-
rorists and became a Maoist. (He later worked
for the Baader-Meinhof gang.) With probing
interviews and intrepid legwork, Schroeder
shows how the anti-colonialist movement was
secretly hijacked by Nazis and other anti-liber-
als, and regretfully traces modern terrorism to
the tactics of Algerian independence fighters.
The story Schroeder unfolds is also his own—
that of a generation that had its humanistic
sympathies manipulated by unscrupulous people
with agendas of horror. In French, German,
English, Arabic, and Khmer.—Richard Brody
(MOMA, Jan. 5 and Jan. 9, and streaming.)
Vice
The writer and director Adam McKay’s fic-
tionalized version of the life of Dick Cheney
(played by Christian Bale) shows him as a
young ne’er-do-well in the nineteen-sixties
whose failures jeopardize his marriage to the
ambitious and orderly Lynne (Amy Adams).
Then he gets an internship with a congressman
named Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), who
schools him in the cynical ways of government.
In the movie’s view, the resignation of President
Richard Nixon is presented as the primal Re-
publican trauma; thereafter, Party operatives
pursue an imperial Presidency unhampered by
law, and Cheney makes his way up the ladder
until, as Vice-President to George W. Bush
(Sam Rockwell), he’s able to wield boundless
power behind the scenes. McKay bitterly and
sometimes cartoonishly illustrates a half century
of grim headlines with some incisive details,
but he treats politics like Hollywood infight-
ing, reducing ideological justifications of cruel
misrule to matters of self-interest and personal
conflict. With Alison Pill, as Mary Cheney; Lily
Rabe, as Liz Cheney; and Tyler Perry, as Colin
Powell.—R .B. (In wide release.)
Welcome to Marwen
In this drama, based on a true story (told in the
2010 documentary “Marwencol”), the director
Robert Zemeckis, a longtime master blender of
live action and animation, pushes that technique
to bold yet tasteless extremes. Steve Carell stars
as Mark Hogancamp, an upstate-New York artist
whose horrific beating by men who mistook him
for gay obliterated his memory and impaired
his coördination. Mark aids his own therapy by
building, in his back yard, an elaborate model
Second World War village and battle site, and
populating it with dolls, resembling people in
his life, that he dresses in costumes of his own
making and photographs in dramatic poses.
Zemeckis turns Mark’s fantasy narratives into
little movies (featuring snap-jointed plastic
characters) and weaves them into Mark’s per-
sonal dramas involving his solitude, his fears,
and his attempts at romance. Despite Mark’s
fascinating work and poignant exertions, the
action is thin, the melodramatic twists are ob-
vious, and the whimsical animation diminishes
the real-life Hogancamp’s earnestly inspired
creativity. With Leslie Mann and Merritt Wev-
e r. —R .B. (In wide release.)
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newyorker.com/goings-on -about-town
(Emily Mortimer) and her brother, Michael
(Ben Whishaw), are the grownup versions of
the children we met in the first film; Michael,
now a widower, still lives in the family home,
but it’s about to be snatched away by—what
else?—wicked bankers. Salvation is required,
and it descends in the form of Mary Poppins
(Emily Blunt), with the help of a local lamp-
lighter named Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda).
We get a bunch of brand-new musical numbers,
most of them mapping onto songs from the
original: there’s another nocturnal dance, for
instance, and a fresh flurry of cartoon creatures.
Marshall gilds the whole thing with an energetic
innocence, and Blunt is both queenly and sharp.
With Dick Van Dyke, again.—A.L . (Reviewed
in our issue of 12/24 & 31/18.) (In wide release.)
Terror’s Advocate
Barbet Schroeder directed this fascinating, ap-
palling documentary portrait, from 2007, of
the French attorney Jacques Vergès, who repre-
sented such clients as Klaus Barbie and Carlos
the Jackal. Vergès discusses his life and work,
starting with the discrimination he faced in his
youth (his mother was from Vietnam, his father
from Réunion) to his first major case, defend-
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